highly customizable menus/submenus

[RBCC]

Is there one piece of software that allows you to change the fonts of the main title, title of the movies, chapters and play all? And also change the words of these? Also allows you to change the bit rate without sacraficing picture quality? And also allows the user to use a video clip for an introduction of the DVD? At least all but the bit rate? I have tried DVD Styler, AVS Video Converter, DVDFlick and all have fixed wording for the chapters and play/all! John

[guns1inger]

Short answer - no.

Long answer - assuming you mean altering an existing DVD, there are many challenges ahead of you.

Start with the simple, you could look at DVD Rebuilder for re-encoding. Every time you re-encode with a lossy codec you do throw away data, and therefore reduce quality. The more data you throw away, the more noticeable this damage becomes. There are two main methods for reducing the size of DVD video. DVD Shrink uses one method, which looks at the data that is there, sees what it thinks it can remove, and does so. The advantage to this method is that it can be quite fast. The downside is that generally, anything more than a few % reduction quickly causes visible damage. DVD Rebuilder re-encodes the video, which is a much slower process, but can produce much higher quality outcomes at higher reduction rates.

Changing menus is a different kettle of fish. A menu consists of a still image or video background, which includes the text, and then a series of graphic overlays that provide the highlights. To change the font you have to extract the still image or video, replace the text with new text in photoshop/gimp etc or your video editor, then extract the overlays and do the same (these are low bit depth graphic images), then insert all of this back into the original.

In most cases it is far simpler to create new menus from scratch with some lick DVD Lab pro, DVD Workshop Pro, GUIForDVDAuthor or DVD Styler, then use the original video/audio/subtitles form the source DVD.

[manono]

Just to add to that:

Changing text in menus can be done without reauthoring the whole thing. How easy or hard it is depends partly on the kind of menu (static or motion) and partly on how much you know. My guide to menu edits might help:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/254043-Guide-for-extracting-menus-for-editing-and-r...00#post1514500

Adding an intro video clip is pretty easy, assuming you've already made a little DVD of the intro clip. Open the DVD in PGCEdit, go Title->Import First-Play (Startup) Clip, and follow the instructions from there.

Changing the chapter points requires reauthoring the main movie, if not the entire DVD. You'll have to demux (PGCDemux), edit the Celltimes.txt, and then reauthor (Muxman), followed by sticking the result back into the DVD (VobBlanker). In principle it's not hard, but it takes time and work.

Is there one piece of software...

No, of course not.

[RBCC]

SO do I burn the avis to the dvd I am creating first??

[manono]

Oh, I see, you don't even have the DVD yet. Why, then, were you yapping about "Also allows you to change the bit rate without sacraficing picture quality?" You're starting with an AVI. You've already lost much of the picture quality. With a decent encoder and a decent authoring program you can do what you want as you make the DVD. I don't use DVD Styler, but I thought it had an encoder built in, and also allows for the making of customized menus. I don't know why you even care about nice looking menus if you're starting with downloaded AVIs.

[RBCC]

So knowing that what do I use first? Because I had a problem with the spoken word not matching up with the sound.

[Milardo]

Hi,

Are you looking for software that is free/open source/freeware or ones that you pay for?

[classfour]

TDA - not free - Does much of what is requested. Can be set to NOT re-encode (depending on input file). You have to rip with another program, and import the DVD file.

[RBCC]

Free is best, but I'll pay for it if it does evrything! jOHN

[guns1inger]

AVStoDVD for your encoding. It can also do menus, but the menu designer is pretty bare bones. What is great is that you can set it to output elementary streams, which you can author into a finished DVD with something like GUIforDVDAuthor or DVD Styler. All of this is free. Put the finished work on disc with Imgburn. If you put all your titles into AVStoDVD at the same time it will calculate the correct sizes and encode all of them to fit.

[Milardo]

I use a couple of software for making dvds.

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/Kiss_DTV_2_DVD

that is for encoding to DVD. You have a lot of options for quality.

DVD Composer

Send me a private message regarding DVD Composer.

Works great and you can customize all the fonts/words I think and use a video clip before menus as an introduction to your dvd. It produces DVD compliant files or folders which you can easily record/burn to a DVD with your favorite program that accepts DVD folders/files.

AVStoDVD is kind of good but not complex enough.

[RBCC]

Thank you very much for your suggestions

[RBCC]

Is there one that allows editing of Subtitles? John

[manono]

Subtitle editing isn't, strictly speaking, part of authoring. Fix them before bringing them into the authoring program. If you tell us what you need to do, maybe we can make suggestions.

[RBCC]

I am trying to use the existing titles of the avis and shorten them to fit under the buttons that are made from the avis on the dvd! John

[manono]

I have no idea what you just said, but it doesn't sound like anything having to do with subtitles to me. It sounds as if you want to modify or edit the menu itself. See if this guide helps at all:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/254043-Guide-for-extracting-menus-for-editing-and-r...g-edited-menus

Maybe The Easy Way section at the bottom might be what you want.

[RBCC]

How do I do whats in the picture? Put 'A' where b is. I am using dvd styler! How do I create a scrolling screen? John

[manono]

I don't use DVD Styler, but it seems to me you can re-create 'B', this time adding in text below it. Or, failing that, you can follow The Easy Way when the DVD is finished, extracting the 'B' picture as a BMP, adding text in some photo editor, and then replacing the BMP.

If you're serious about wanting scrolling text (why?) then you're talking about creating a motion menu. That's exponentially harder and will require you knowing how to use some NLE such as Vegas, or AviSynth, and then rencoding the result to MPEG-2 video. If I were you, I'd be satisfied with static text.

[RBCC]

You know the beginning of the star wars movie ? That scrolling text I would like to something like that. Which DVD authoring tool will take the filename and put on the background? John

[manono]

That's not authoring. You create that yourself and then import it into DVDStyler for use in a menu. I know of no authoring program using that sort of thing as a template (but I don't use that many different authoring programs myself). A simple search on the web would have told you more than you ever wanted to know about it because it's often done by people with no imagination of their own:

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGdWM13BhP128AOM9XNyoA;_ylc=X1MDMjc2NjY3OQRfcgMy...20text%20crawl

There are links here to tutorials on doing it using both After Effects and 3D Studio Max:

http://theforce.net/fanfilms/postproduction/crawl/opening.asp

[mgh]

You can generate scrolling text with Wax

Wax is free